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Earlier this week when Kristine Kathrine Rusch offered the end-of-year challenge—try to out-write her word count for $600 in class credits or still get $300 in class credits for completing—I thought about doing it. Briefly. My Adaptability strength does much better with outside deadlines than ones I set.

But…

I’d have to do a daily word count. For two weeks, I might have managed it. But I was more than likely to mess it up, since the strength to do that kind of tracking is in my bottom 20 of the Clifton Strengths. Plus, well, Adaptablity.

Also, the cost. I wasn’t sure of the value of spending for something like this (though I was curious to know what Kris would send out). Though I want to take one of the advanced classes, I wasn’t so sure about giving them the $300 until July (it’s the Advanced Information Flow class, a topic I’m having trouble finding much about). So I briefly considered, for a few hours, then decided it wasn’t worth the money.

But, really, everything these days needs supervision. You cannot go on autopilot with decisions because the world is competing to do everything for us. Even marketing tries to take away the decision with fancy words and shiny images.

That’s not a good thing.

This last week, I tried a free trial for a new writing Tool called Draftsmith. It’s similar to ProWritingAid and was created by PerfectIt. The latter is a copyediting tool I use for the finishing stages of a final proofreading. If you pay for a copy editor, they probably use this tool as part of their process. Michael La Ronne also provided input for Draftsmith.

One of the reasons he did was because Grammarly and PWA have too many false audits, especially for fiction writing.

And it’s actually gotten a lot worse since ChatGPT exploded on the market. The book Unsupervised is a scary read about what exactly AI is doing.

When I first started using PWA, I was doing a refresh of most of my published books and short stories. It was amazing to find many typos (mostly missing articles) that a copy edit I’d paid for had missed entirely. I don’t think she did a bad job; missing articles are very hard to find. Even with multiple eyeballs on a novel, as Nora Roberts describes, I still find some typos in the books.

So that makes PWA a useful tool. It also showed me that I was using a Sentence construction too much: “He was” and other variations. The tool identified this as Passive Voice, which I disagreed with. The subject was in the right place. I think it identified the use of “was” as passive voice. This is one of those writing areas where you have to supervise to see if it’s actually passive voice. Most of us aren’t writing sentences like “Mistakes were made,” which is classic passive voice. Though I knew a writer who had a big problem with that because his job required passive voice, a habit he struggled to break in fiction writing.

PWA made me reset how I wrote so I don’t use the “He was” structure as much. After that, I pretty much ignored those flags. And the tool flags “pretty much” as excessive words that can be removed. But I’m the writer and I wanted to use them.

Draftsmith is in the very early stages, and I do mean early. There are lots of problems with it. Among other things, it couldn’t figure out the names I used and kept wanting me to change them, sometimes not even consistently to the same thing. If I backed up and tried again, I often got different variations (and spellings!) to correct the name. They couldn’t be saved in a dictionary.

I also had some sentences it seemed totally confused by, since it gave me back another sentence that was completely different. And everything is British spelling that cannot be changed. The tool doesn’t give you a highlighted correction, so it’s hard to see if you should fix it. So not ready for prime time.

PWA, on the other hand, has gotten a lot more aggressive. I spent the better part of an hour reporting flags as incorrect because of this. The tool flags word choices and says, “Improve your vocabulary” and suggests a word. I have a number of problems and concerns with this:

1. If the tool is suggesting the word, it’s probably not going to improve your vocabulary. All you’re doing is selecting a word.
   
2. Just because a word is listed in the Thesaurus as an alternative doesn’t mean they are interchangeable. They are merely similar and have different definitions. You should always look up the definitions when using alternatives to make sure it means what you want it to.
   
3. I’m writing fiction! My word choices are because that’s what the character would say or is part of my voice. “Improving my vocabulary” would ruin the characterization and my voice.
   
4. The tool tries to control how I write. If I hit “ignore,” it circles back and prompts me for the same correction again. If I hit Disable Rule, nothing happens. The same flag shows up over and over, each one flagged twice. (Grammarly wants me to change “over and over” on the quest for conciseness. “Over and over” says frustration; repeatedly does not).

The concern, and it’s a doozy: some writers, particularly beginners, would use these tools without supervision.

That is, they would agree to everything. There are writers who do that already with critiques, so it’s not a big stretch. Heck, early on, I assumed everyone else was right and changed what I wrote based on other people’s comments without deciding myself.

Why is this such a problem? It’s guts the voice and the character from the story.

Take this sentence (from Superhero Vs. Superhero):

A late afternoon thunderstorm snarled at downtown Metro City.

Grammarly tells me that removing the “at” will make the sentence clearer.  

A late afternoon thunderstorm snarled downtown Metro City.

That changes the meaning of the sentence! It goes from a nasty storm to a storm that causes a traffic jam.

Or try this one:

“It’s freaking huge!” she said.

First flag: Tool tells me to remove “freaking” because it’s unnecessary and this will tighten up the sentence. If I accept it, the sentence becomes: “It’s huge!” she said.

Second flag: The tool tells me to expand my vocabulary, suggesting I use enormous instead. For the purposes of this, I looked both words up on Merriam Webster.

Huge: “very large or extensive: such as great in scale or degree.”

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Enormous: “marked by extraordinarily great size, number, or degree.”

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Those do not mean the same thing!

But, following in the thread, I’ll change it: “It’s enormous!” she said.

And now the characterization and my voice has gone as flat soda without carbonation.

The bigger problem with this is that we had control of our knowledge over to a program. And guess what? The technology is controlled by a small group of people who want to make money and have power.

This is what we’re handing our writing off to?